This invention concerns the selective segmenting of irregularly shaped items such as fish filets, or meat cuts, particularly at the point of sale. Complex and bulky machinery has heretofore been devised for automatically cutting up food items such as fish fillets into portions of a desired weight in food packing operations which supply food retailers with pre-weighed packages.
However, at the retail level, the problem still exists as to how to segment an irregularly shaped food item such as a fish fillet or meat cut to a particular weight requested by a customer (or to a price based on the weight) or to determine the weight and/or cost of a selected portion. When a customer requests a certain weight portion of a food item such as a fish fillet, a segment is cut from the item based on the best estimate made by the server as to the weight of that segment. Too often, upon being weighed, the selected portion does not turn out to weigh (or cost) what the customer requested due to the difficulty in estimating the weight of a particular segment of quite variably shaped food item. This is a particular problem with inexperienced servers. Also, a customer may sometimes wish to see how much a certain portion weighs (or costs) before the portion is cut. The aforementioned automatic machinery cannot do this and is not otherwise suited to retail shop applications, as it is too bulky, complex, and expensive for retail shop use.
It is the object of the present invention to provide a relatively simple to use and compact apparatus and method for quickly providing an indication of the weight and/or cost of a particular uncut segment of an irregularly shaped item.
It is another object to provide such apparatus and method which is suitable for use in a retail fish or meat market or elsewhere for accurately and quickly providing a computation of the weight (or cost based on weight) of a selected cut or uncut segment of a food or other non-food items.
The apparatus and method may also be used for other segmenting applications where a non-food item needs to be portioned or a weight determination made quickly and accurately. While particularly advantageous for retail sale use, it may also be used in industrial applications as providing a lower cost alternative for existing automated processing equipment.